Tag Archives: microwave

I’ve heard from a couple of people who didn’t immediately understand the cartoon above but when they did, they laughed. I love cartoons like that. I was proud of this one when I thought of it because it is fairly surreal, yet also a completely simple twist on a popular saying. In my experience of writing a joke a day for over 30 years*, I find that surprise is the most dependable way to get a laugh. I always love finding a surprising angle on a cliche expression, and this one achieves that very well in my opinion. PLUS, it has elevenSecret Symbols, including the newly-added “O2,” which you can find out about under that blue link you just sailed past.

* As of today, May 1, 2017, I’ve published 11,788 cartoons since Bizarro began.

I’ve written more than my share of cartoons about cloning in my day. I’m skeptical that cloning humans will ever be a thing, but I can’t help but wonder about it. Under these blue wordsis one of my faves from 1997. The colors are hideous because I had to color the old-fashioned way back then, which was complex and inaccurate. Only a few months later I began using a computer to color them and everything changed for the better.

I don’t have much to say about this one other than that at Bunny’s Diner, they do things just like Mom used to.

I arrived at this cartoon by asking myself, “What would be even worse than having a small person growing out of your shoulder?” My answer is illustrated above, I welcome your ideas in the comments section.

I have been a performing musician from time to time and I have great respect and affection for musicians in general. I cannot, however, stand cafes and restaurants with live music. They are virtually always too loud to ignore and they diminish my ability to converse with my companion(s), which is one of the two reasons I go to cafes and restaurants. If I want to hear live music, I go to a live music venue. I also can’t help but feel sorry for them because people rarely pay any attention to a musician in this kind of setup. For all that most people get out of it, they might as well be dressed in a tutu and be dancing Swan Lake in the corner of the cafe. Am I being a jerk about this? Probably.

When I wrote this cartoon about border collies I figured someone else had probably already come up with a cartoon about this pun so I googled it. Googling gag ideas has become fairly standard practice for me with certain kinds of phrases or puns that I suspect someone else might have arrived at before me, and when I see that it has been done, I always kill the idea and move on. In this case, yes, it has been done a couple of times before but it was done differently and I thought mine was funnier, so I did it anyway.

The basic idea for this cartoon came from an unsolicited Facebook message from someone calling himself Kenneth McCoy. I get lots of gag suggestions from readers but I only use a very tiny percentage of them. This one seemed like one I would have thought of, so I went for it. If any of you know Kenneth, tell him I mentioned him in this blog post today.

Hope you have a great week, Jazz Pickles! If you enjoy my work, please consider one or more of the support options below. The folks here at Rancho Bizarro will think of you every time we buy groceries and tequila!

I’ll start today by saying I really love the title panel at top. It was cobbled out of a piece of an old Sunday cartoon of mine from ’08 which is one of my favorites. You can see it here.The “City Boy” cartoon itself is another of my favorite concepts. I actually published this idea several decades ago as a weekday cartoon but it was before cartoons were featured on the web and before I had learned to color my own work for print in Photoshop. SO –– I couldn’t resist redoing it with better art and color. I hope you enjoy the creepy goodness of the bottom-lit hillbillies.

The weekday cartoons from last week looked exactly like the six that follow here. Holder and Son are still pissing off customers by keeping them on hold indefinitely. We’ve all called these guys before.

Mopeye the Tailor is hard at work threatening his customer very much the way his brother might. On a side note, when my first child was on her way and I didn’t know what its pronoun would be, I wanted to name the thing Popeye if it were a boy. The child’s mother steadfastly refused but I figured I’d call him that anyway. Who says both parents have to name their kid the same thing? She was a girl and so was the only other child I was directly responsible for so the controversy never materialized. As some of you know, their names are Krapuzar and Krelspeth, and it is a wink to them when I put a “K2” in my cartoons.

I think I accidentally published this cartoon twice in recent years. It’s the perfect one to do that to considering the subject matter. Guess I need to get back to my support group.

Back when I used to play a lot of tennis, I had a weak ankle that gave me a bit of trouble from time to time so I had to learn the proper way to wrap it. Years later, this cartoon sprouted from the experience.

I got a few notes asking me to explain this one, which was completely expected because it is a bit tricky. The simple answer is that, as the sign predicts, they were (emotionally) moved by the sale. This pun was submitted by a reader and it took me a few beats to figure it out, too. But once I did, I laughed. Hope you did too. Many thanks to 71-year-old Rick Targow for the pun!

Our last cartoon this week is about macro vs. micro. Is it a big laugh or a small one? This idea sprung from the fact that back in the 60s or so, in the early days of computers, the most powerful computer in the world was about the size of a UPS truck and it had a capacity of something like 5MG of information. That’s smaller than a single cartoon of mine after it has been colored in Photoshop at the size and resolution King Features requires for publication.